Wages Should Be Determined by Markets, not Quota-Driven Bureaucrats

Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute decimates the bean-counting feminist “paycheck fairness” legislation being considered by the Senate. Republicans presumably know this is a bad idea, but one can only wonder whether they will do the right thing and block this initiative that at best will be a boon for trial lawyers and at worst will lead to massive government intervention in employment markets. Here’s an excerpt from her New York Times column.

…on the Senate’s to-do list before the November elections is a “paycheck fairness” bill, which would make it easier for women to file class-action, punitive-damages suits against employers they accuse of sex-based pay discrimination. …the bill…overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women, and it threatens to impose onerous requirements on employers to correct gaps over which they have little control. …proponents point out that for every dollar men earn, women earn just 77 cents. …there are lots of…reasons men might earn more than women, including differences in education, experience and job tenure. When these factors are taken into account the gap narrows considerably – in some studies, to the point of vanishing. A recent survey found that young, childless, single urban women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts, mostly because more of them earn college degrees. Moreover, a 2009 analysis of wage-gap studies commissioned by the Labor Department evaluated more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the aggregate wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” …The Paycheck Fairness bill would set women against men, empower trial lawyers and activists, perpetuate falsehoods about the status of women in the workplace and create havoc in a precarious job market. It is 1970s-style gender-war feminism.